Social media usage and my personality

I as a social media user

Looking back at my previous social media usage, I am confident to say that I am not a heavy social media user. Rather, I define myself as an active consumer. Usually, I use social media to find information and check trends and issues on research or cooking. Also, I do not extend my personal networks to the outside of my face to face relationships. Nowadays, it seems to have more fatigue than the extension of relationships and information sharing. 

Even my trait that I try to maintain my small world as I can control is becoming clearer and stronger. I know that I am an easy person to be addictive and hard to escape from the point I focus on. And I like to observe something for a long time. After I realized that personality, I am trying to be calm and simple. When I was younger and had more curiosity for everything, I really liked to connect with new people and shared resources actively. For example, I really liked Japanese Culture and joined a community and met the people face to face to interact with them a lot. But, to achieve a simple life and maintain being calm, I have been keeping monotonous routines for over ten years. It feels like I lost appetite using social media and interests in people and society.

However, activities in EME 6414 class help me to get back my social media interest. Reading articles describing phenomena on Web 2.0 society and knowing other students' opinions became the trigger to 'watch' and 'participate in' the social media world in different minds and eyes. Sometimes, I am still hesitant to leave comments and communicate with them and I know it takes time but I will try to enjoy the world.

A study on personal trait and social capital in social media

In the same vein, I read an interesting recent article on the relationship between personality traits and social capital. Ma and Leung (2018) explored about 300 non-students LinkedIn user applying the five-factor model (FFM), which includes the big five personality traits; extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The results showed that agreeable personalities which refer to the tendency to be sympathetic and cooperative and includes characteristics such as tendermindedness and modesty perceived that they gained more bridging social capital - deriving from dissimilar persons at the same level of hierarchy or from weak-tie relationships - by being active in LinkedIn. It means that agreeable people perceived that LinkedIn facilitated contacting strangers and strengthening weak ties and relationships and that they use LinkedIn to expand their careers and increase their bridging social capital. I thought those results could be different when you explore other social platforms and personality. And those kinds of research can be helpful for application in educational contexts. 

In sum, reflection on my social media usage concluded my mind and using patterns were based on my personality and environment, and I am trying to look different! It is slow but I will become a flexible user anyway!:)